In 'Man,' Auster conjures crises real and fantastic

PAUL AUSTER (LOTTE HANSEN)

Man in the Dark
By Paul Auster
Holt, 180 pp., $23

The opening paragraphs of Paul Auster's 14th novel, "Man in the Dark," seem to presage a work of Beckett-like detachment and interiority, steered less by the real world than by the fabulous, absurdist meanderings of the mind. "I am alone in the dark," narrator August Brill announces as the novel begins, "turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness." And by the third page the reader is cast into the story that Brill creates to while away the black night: a sleeping man is in a deep hole in the ground, "dug in such a way as to form a perfect circle, with sheer inner walls of dense, tightly packed earth, so hard that the surfaces have the texture of baked clay, perhaps even glass. In other words, the man in the hole will be unable to extricate himself from the hole once he opens his eyes."

The man in the hole, it turns out, is one Owen Brick, a 29-year-old from Queens, N.Y., who makes his living performing magic tricks as the Great Zavello at children's birthday parties but has woken to discover that he has been enlisted as an assassin in the brutal, seemingly endless civil war that began brewing after the 2000 presidential elections and led to the secession first of New York and then 15 other states. But this war, Brick soon learns, has been set in motion solely by the imagination of the journalist and literary critic August Brill. Kill Brill, Brick is told, and the war will end.

Just when the reader begins to believe that Auster's novel, despite its metafictional frame, fits neatly into the genre of speculative fiction - exploring the fantastic notion of an America that does not suffer the 9/11 attacks and does not go to war in Iraq but nevertheless endures horrible divisiveness and destruction - the narrative returns to the circumstances of Brill's life and the very personal agony that shapes the story he invents as he lies alone in the dark.

Brill finds himself in as deep and troubling a hole as the one into which he has placed the character of Brick. After his wife died, Brill shattered his leg in an automobile accident, and for more than a year the 72-year-old man has been confined to a bed on the first floor of his lonely, divorced daughter Miriam's Vermont house, accompanied now as well by his 23-year-old granddaughter, Katya, whose heart is broken after the death of her estranged boyfriend, Titus.

It is not until the novel's final pages that we learn precisely how and why Titus died, but the memory of that death informs the novel's events as fully as all the other memories Brill recounts: his courtship of and marriage to Sonia Weil, a Juilliard-trained singer to whom after 17 years of marriage he is unfaithful, an affair that leads to their divorce and his marriage to a beautiful young novelist who then leaves him, an abandonment that sends Brill into an alcohol-soaked despair that lifts only when, with the birth of Katya, he is reunited with Sonia.

Just as Brill's fantastic story of Brick is recounted from his bed in the dark at night, so too is the story of his complex relationship with Sonia, but for the latter story, the true story, Katya lies beside him, plagued by insomnia as well and by the tragedy of her own life. She listens as he speaks, asks questions, tells him what she does and does not want to know about her grandfather and grandmother, and the reader finally discovers that Auster's true subject is the remarkable power of stories themselves, how the act of speaking and listening can sustain us even in the midst of terrible violence and chaos and despair.

"For the first time in hours," Brill says after he has concluded telling Katya his story and she has fallen asleep, "I close my eyes, wondering if it might not be possible to sleep after all." Eyes closed, he sees Sonia playing Haydn on the piano but can't hear her and then sees their 3-year-old daughter Miriam run into her arms, "an image," he says, "from the distant past, perhaps real, perhaps imagined, I can barely tell the difference anymore. The real and the imagined are one. . . . Yesterday a child, today an old man, and from then until now, how many beats of the heart, how many breaths, how many words spoken and heard? Touch me, someone. Put your hand on my face and talk to me . . ."

"Man in the Dark" does nothing less than make the real and imagined seem to be one and the same, pieced together from the fragments of our lives. It displays the remarkable power of stories to sustain us even during the darkest of hours. This brief, remarkable novel does indeed possess the brilliant spare acuity of Beckett, but it also possesses a grand and generous heart. It affirms that we must go on even when we believe that we cannot.

John Gregory Brown is completing his fourth novel, "The Sorrows of Henry Garrett." He teaches at Sweet Briar College in Virginia.